skip to content

← back to the plays

independence2 unconnected · 2 more authors in those circles
standing

contested · 3 claims against 5

applies to

b2b, no audience needed

mixed results

confidence

low

evidence

9 claims · 5 articles · 4 receipts

window

2020-08-07 → 2023-09-08

2 builders who never spoke to each other · contested

Coin the category and own its vocabulary

Reframe the space you sit in under a name you invented, derive that name from the story you already tell, and the reward is that customers describe the whole problem in your words. How much that is worth is directly disputed here: one side points at brands whose term became the verb, the other at labels practitioners never adopted and at first movers whose category creation bought them nothing.

What both sides agree on

  • Test a positioning bet cheaply before committing the company to it - market one product from the lineup under the new category, or run a limited campaign, and measure whether target buyers respond.

Where this splits

Naming a category is presented both as the differentiator that hands you the market's language and as marketing noise that neither sells to enterprises nor protects a first mover from a cheaper copy.

  1. side 01 · 5 claims

    Category names are noise and protect nobody

    Failory · Glen Allsopp · Greg Kogan

    1. 1Before betting the company name on a category label, check whether practitioners recognize the term at all, because a label nobody uses reads as marketing noise.
    2. 2Winning enterprise customers takes the same messaging, positioning, packaging and pricing work whether or not you coined a category - the category label itself is rarely what makes large companies buy.
    3. 3First mover advantage in hardware evaporates once someone abroad ships a good enough version more cheaply, so do not treat creating the category as a moat.
    4. 4Being first in a niche is not a moat: a later rival that grows to many times your traffic can make your site not worth operating.
    5. 5Even a fully resourced, multi-year category push can leave you still competing on the old category's terms, so plan to keep conventional product labels and value propositions in your funnel.

  2. side 02 · 3 claims

    Invent a category name and own its vocabulary

    Harry Dry

    1. 1Differentiate by inventing and naming a category, then making ownership of that term your mission.
    2. 2The payoff of a category you invented is that you set its vocabulary, up to customers using your brand name as the verb.
    3. 3Derive the positioning line from a real story rather than inventing it: the one-line summary is the last step of the narrative, not the starting point.

What it returned

  • 2016

    Drift launched in 2016 as one more live chat tool and reframed the space as conversational marketing

  • $1.5

    Users say they will send a Loom rather than send a video message; Loom reached a $1.5bn valuation, more than the unopinionated screen recorders combined

  • 2

    Mesosphere renamed itself D2iQ for Day 2 Operations in August 2019; a director of engineering he interviewed had never heard the term, another engineering leader dismissed it, and the company later switched its headline to a conventional Kubernetes platform claim.

  • Drift's category name is the closing bullet of the story they tell, not a phrase pulled from nowhere

Sources

the second source

Three plays a week, for the phase you are in

No roundup of links, no news. Three tactics more than one builder arrived at separately, with the numbers each one returned and the disagreements left in.

One email a week. Unsubscribe in one click, and the address is used for this and nothing else.

More in positioning

all positioning plays

the second source

Three plays a week, for the phase you are in

No roundup of links, no news. Three tactics more than one builder arrived at separately, with the numbers each one returned and the disagreements left in.

963 corroborated plays to draw from · 3 a week

One email a week. Unsubscribe in one click, and the address is used for this and nothing else.